Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

I have not done this but I wouldn't see why you could not depending on the size of the hard drive in the iPod. You can enable disk use and the iPod acts as an external hard drive. You can drop any files into the notes folder and carry them wherever you go. That is great for general purpose stuff but what if you wanted to take advantage of all that unused space on your 160 GB classic? I did a little homework by opening up disk utility and my 30 GB 5th gen video was shown on the left with all of the internal hard drives that I have (5 total) on my PowerMac G5. I clicked the partition tab and it allowed me to repartition the iPod if I so choose. I didnt want to lose all of the media in the device so I chose not to at this time. That in itself may be of some use for backup purposes. You could use Super Duper or Carbon Copy cloner to back up individual files or the entire OS if the iPod is big enough, for example the 60,80 or the 160 classic. BUT.... will you be able to boot from it???? Maybe. There are several factors that will determine if your system can boot from USB. Is it an Intel machine that you are using? Is it a PowerPC machine? Depending... Apple will or will not officially support this. But there are work arounds. I have found a few sites that I will list below that I suggest to you for further reading. I will say that I am not an expert at this and I am working with my existing knowledge and a little help from google.

Users have posted comments on how they feel that this could or could not work, technical issues and so forth.

I would recommend getting a small 120 or 250 GB firewire bus powered external hard drive. You could use Super Duper or CCC here to clone your computer to that and boot from the external whenever needed if portability is a must for you. If I am wrong on any of this, please someone correct me. We are all here to learn and spread our knowledge with other Mac users.

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

Booting up your ipod with OSX isn't possible. Using your ipod as a disk drive and having a bootable copy of OSX on it I believe is although not officially supported and specifically not recommended. Apple doesn't seem to like you using an ipod as a drive that much. They always warn it's not meant to be used that way.

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

It's not a fake if it's just a mac booting off an iPod. I've done it several times when I don't have a hard drive to hand. If you mean OS X booting on the actual iPod (dock on the iPod screen etc), then yes, it's fake.

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

Could I get a clarification? I had heard elsewhere that OS X can only boot from an external HD via Firewire. If that is correct, how could you boot from a USB iPod? Or is there some "hack" that will allow you to boot from USB drives?

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

It's not a fake if it's just a mac booting off an iPod. I've done it several times when I don't have a hard drive to hand. If you mean OS X booting on the actual iPod (dock on the iPod screen etc), then yes, it's fake.

Share on other sites

a) Linux is open source. It can be compiled for any type of processor. OS X isn't open source (well, most of it isn't. Basically only the kernel is open source, all the nice GUI bits are proprietary). Apple would either need to release the entire source (not gonna happen) or compile it themselves for whatever processor iPods have in them.

b ) Linux can be built to have an incredibly tiny footprint. If I remember correctly (and I am probably wrong about this, but the general point still stands) the iPods have something like a 25Mhz processor in them. The iPhone and iPod touch (which are running a stripped down version of OSX) have processors running at roughly 400Mhz.

In short, OS X as you see it on your desktop or iPhone / iPod touch is not going to happen.